This week Alphabet CEO Sundar Picahi assured investors that their long-term AI focus and investment (and a "commitment to innovation") "are paying off," reports the Associated Press. Alphabet's stock has already soared 20% this year, and it's "still thriving" as the company "navigates through a pivotal shift to AI and battles regulators..." Alphabet earned $26.3 billion, or $2.12 per share during the most recent quarter, a 34% increase from a year ago. Revenue rose 15% from the same time last year to $88.27 billion... The profits would have been even higher if Google wasn't pouring so much money into building up its AI arsenal in a technological arms race that includes other industry heavyweights Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Facebook parent Meta Platforms and rising star OpenAI. The AI investments are the primary reason Google's capital expenditures in the past quarter soared 62% from the same time last year to $13.1 billion. The AI spending will likely stay at roughly the same level during the current October-December period, and the rise even higher next year, according to Anat Ashkenazi, Alphabet's chief financial officer.

But Ashkenazi also emphasized the Mountain View, California, company will act on cost-cutting opportunities in other areas to help boost profits. Alphabet already has trimmed its payroll from more than 190,000 worldwide employees early last year to about 181,000 workers now. In an example of how AI can perform tasks that once required human brainpower, Pichai said the technology is now writing more than 25% of the company's new computer coding.
After the results, investors sent Alphabet's stock price up 5% in extended trading, the article points out. "Both Alphabet's profit and revenue increased at a brisker pace than industry analysts anticipated, thanks primarily to a moneymaking machine powered by Google's ubiquitous search engine... [Google's digital search-engine ads earned $49.39 billion, 12% more than the same quarter of 2023.] And Google's cloud division is growing at an even more robust rate, thanks to demand for AI services. The cloud division generated $11.35 billion in revenue during the past quarter, a 35% increase from last year."

And meanwhile over at Microsoft, quarterly sales surged 16% to $65.6 billion, reports the Associated Press. But again, "the company sought to assure investors its huge spending on artificial intelligence is paying off." The company has spent billions of dollars to expand its global network of data centers and other physical infrastructure required to develop AI technology... As a result, AI-related products are now on track to contribute about $10 billion to the company's annual revenue, the "fastest business in our history to reach this milestone," CEO Satya Nadella said on a call with analysts Wednesday. [Though Microsoft "hasn't yet formally reported revenue specifically from AI products," the article notes later, with Microsoft instead saying it's infused AI and Copilot into all its business segments.]
Just in the last quarter, Microsoft spent $20 billion "mostly for its cloud computing and AI needs," the article points out.

But there's still making plenty of money... The software maker also reported an 11% increase in quarterly profit to $24.7 billion, or $3.30 per share, which beat Wall Street expectations for the July-September period... Leading in sales for the quarter was Microsoft's productivity business segment, which includes its Office suite of email and other workplace products, growing 12% to $28.3 billion. Microsoft's cloud-focused business segment grew 20% from the same time last year to $24.1 billion for the three months ending Sept. 30. Its personal computing business, led by its Windows division, grew 17% to $13.2 billion. A big part of that growth came from Microsoft's Xbox video game business, which was boosted by its purchase of game publishing giant Activision Blizzard a year ago.

Google's transistion to Safe Coding and memory-safe languages "will take multiple years," according to a post on Google's security blog. So "we're also retrofitting secure-by-design principles to our existing C++ codebase wherever possible," a process which includes "working towards bringing spatial memory safety into as many of our C++ codebases as possible, including Chrome and the monolithic codebase powering our services." We've begun by enabling hardened libc++, which adds bounds checking to standard C++ data structures, eliminating a significant class of spatial safety bugs. While C++ will not become fully memory-safe, these improvements reduce risk as discussed in more detail in our perspective on memory safety, leading to more reliable and secure software... It's also worth noting that similar hardening is available in other C++ standard libraries, such as libstdc++. Building on the successful deployment of hardened libc++ in Chrome in 2022, we've now made it default across our server-side production systems. This improves spatial memory safety across our services, including key performance-critical components of products like Search, Gmail, Drive, YouTube, and Maps... The performance impact of these changes was surprisingly low, despite Google's modern C++ codebase making heavy use of libc++. Hardening libc++ resulted in an average 0.30% performance impact across our services (yes, only a third of a percent) ...

In just a few months since enabling hardened libc++ by default, we've already seen benefits. Hardened libc++ has already disrupted an internal red team exercise and would have prevented another one that happened before we enabled hardening, demonstrating its effectiveness in thwarting exploits. The safety checks have uncovered over 1,000 bugs, and would prevent 1,000 to 2,000 new bugs yearly at our current rate of C++ development...

The process of identifying and fixing bugs uncovered by hardened libc++ led to a 30% reduction in our baseline segmentation fault rate across production, indicating improved code reliability and quality. Beyond crashes, the checks also caught errors that would have otherwise manifested as unpredictable behavior or data corruption... Hardened libc++ enabled us to identify and fix multiple bugs that had been lurking in our code for more than a decade. The checks transform many difficult-to-diagnose memory corruptions into immediate and easily debuggable errors, saving developers valuable time and effort.
The post notes that they're also working on "making it easier to interoperate with memory-safe languages. Migrating our C++ to Safe Buffers shrinks the gap between the languages, which simplifies interoperability and potentially even an eventual automated translation."

Automotive Grade Linux is a collaborative open source project developing "an open platform from the ground up that can serve as the de facto industry standard" for fast development of new features. Automakers have joined with tech companies and suppliers to speed up development (and adoption) of "a fully open software stack for the connected car" — hosted at the Linux Foundation, and "with Linux at its core..."

And this week they created a new Open Source Program Office expert group, led by Toyota, to promote the establishment of Open Source Program Offices within the automotive industry, "and encourage the sharing of information and best practices between them." Open source software has become more prevalent across the automotive industry as automakers invest more time and resources into software development. Automakers like Toyota and Subaru are using open source software for infotainment and instrument cluster applications. Other open source applications across the automotive industry include R&D, testing, vehicle-to-cloud and fleet management. "Historically, there has been little code contributed back to the open source community," said Dan Cauchy, Executive Director of Automotive Grade Linux. "Often, this was because the internal procedures or IT infrastructure weren't in place to support open source contributions. The rise of software-defined vehicles has led to a growing trend of automakers not just using, but also contributing, to open source software. Many organizations are also establishing Open Source Program Offices to streamline and organize open source activities to better support business goals."

Automakers including Toyota, Honda, and Volvo have already established Open Source Program Offices. The new AGL OSPO Expert Group provides a neutral space for them to share pain points and collaborate on solutions, exchange information, and develop best practices that can help other automakers build their own OSPOs. "Toyota has been participating in AGL and the broader open source community for over a decade," said Masato Endo, Group Manager of Open Source Program Group, Toyota. "We established an OSPO earlier this year to promote the use of open source software internally and to help guide how and where we contribute. We are looking forward to working with other open source leaders to solve common problems, collaborate on best practices, and invigorate open source activities in the automotive industry."

The AGL OSPO EG is led by Toyota with support from Panasonic and AISIN Corporation.

jojowombl shares a report from The Guardian: Legal documents released in ongoing US litigation between NSO Group and WhatsApp have revealed for the first time that the Israeli cyberweapons maker -- and not its government customers -- is the party that "installs and extracts" information from mobile phones targeted by the company's hacking software. The new details were contained in sworn depositions from NSO Group employees, portions of which were published for the first time on Thursday.

It comes five years after WhatsApp, the popular messaging app owned by Facebook, first announced it was filing suit against NSO. The company, which was blacklisted by the Biden administration in 2021, makes what is widely considered the world's most sophisticated hacking software, which -- according to researchers -- has been used in the past in Saudi Arabia, Dubai, India, Mexico, Morocco and Rwanda. [...] At the heart of the legal fight was an allegation by WhatsApp that NSO had long denied: that it was the Israeli company itself, and not its government clients around the world, who were operating the spyware. NSO has always said that its product is meant to be used to prevent serious crime and terrorism, and that clients are obligated not to abuse the spyware. It has also insisted that it does not know who its clients are targeting. [...]

To make its case, WhatsApp was allowed by Judge Phyllis Hamilton to make its case, including citing depositions that have previously been redacted and out of public view. In one, an NSO employee said customers only needed to enter a phone number of the person whose information was being sought. Then, the employee said, "the rest is done automatically by the system." In other words, the process was not operated by customers. Rather NSO alone decided to access WhatsApp's servers when it designed (and continuously upgraded) Pegasus to target individuals' phones. A spokesperson for NSO, Gil Lainer, said in a statement: "NSO stands behind its previous statements in which we repeatedly detailed that the system is operated solely by our clients and that neither NSO nor its employees have access to the intelligence gathered by the system. We are confident that these claims, like many others in the past, will be proven wrong in court, and we look forward to the opportunity to do so."

ZDNet's Steven Vaughan-Nichols reports: [...] At KubeCon North America 2024 this week, CNCF executive director Priyanka Sharma said in her keynote, "Patent trolls are not contributors or even adopters in our ecosystem. Instead, they prey on cloud-native adopters by abusing the legal system. We are here to tell the world that these patent trolls don't stand a chance because CNCF is uniting the ecosystem to deter them. Like a herd of musk oxen, we will run them off our pasture." CNCF CTO Chris Aniszczyk added: "The reason trolls can make money is that many companies find it too expensive to fight back, so they pay trolls a settlement fee to avoid the even higher cost of litigation. Now, when a whole herd of companies band together like musk oxen to drive a troll off, it changes the cost structure of fighting back. It disrupts their economic model."

How? Jim Zemlin, the Linux Foundation's executive director, said, "We don't negotiate with trolls. Instead, with United Patents, we go to the PTO and crush those patents. We strive to invalidate them by working with developers who have prior art, bringing this to the attention of the USPTO, and killing patents. No negotiation, no settlement. We destroy the very asset that made patent trolls' business work. Together, since we've started this effort, 90% of the time, we've been able to go in there and destroy these patents." "It's time for us to band together," said Joanna Lee, CNCF's VP of strategic programs and legal. "We encourage all organizations in our ecosystem to get involved. Join the fight, enhance your own company's protection, protect your customers, enhance our community defense, and save money on legal expenses."

While getting your company and its legal department involved in the effort to fend off patent trolls is important, developers can also help. CNCF announced the Cloud Native Heroes Challenge, a patent troll bounty program in which cloud-native developers and technologists can earn swag and win prizes. They're asking you to find evidence of preexisting technology -- referred to by patent lawyers as "prior art" -- that can kill off bad patents. This could be open-source documentation (including release notes), published standards or specifications, product manuals, articles, blogs, books, or any publicly available information. All entrants who submit an entry that conforms to the contest rules will receive a free "Cloud Native Hero" t-shirt that can be picked up at any future KubeCon+CloudNativeCon. The winner will also receive a $3,000 cash prize.

In the inaugural contest, the CNCF is seeking information that can be used to invalidate Claim 1 from US Patent US-11695823-B1. This is the major patent asserted by Edge Networking Systems against Kubernetes users. As is often the case with such patents, it's much too broad. This patent describes a network architecture that facilitates secure and flexible programmability between a user device and across a network with full lifecycle management of services and infrastructure applications. That describes pretty much any modern cloud system. If you can find prior art that describes such a system before June 13, 2013, you could be a winner. Some such materials have already been found. This is already listed in the "known references" tab of the contest information page and doesn't qualify. If you care about keeping open-source software easy and cheap to use -- or you believe trolls shouldn't be allowed to take advantage of companies that make or use programs -- you can help. I'll be doing some digging myself.

Each day leading up through the 16th (the official day Half-Life 2 was launched), Ars Technica will be publishing a new article looking back at the game and its impact. Here's an excerpt from an article published today by Ars Technica's Kyle Orland: When millions of eager gamers first installed Half-Life 2 20 years ago, many, if not most, of them found they needed to install another piece of software alongside it. Few at the time could imagine that piece of companion software -- with the pithy name Steam -- would eventually become the key distribution point and social networking center for the entire PC gaming ecosystem, making the idea of physical PC games an anachronism in the process.

While Half-Life 2 wasn't the first Valve game released on Steam, it was the first high-profile title to require the platform, even for players installing the game from physical retail discs. That requirement gave Valve access to millions of gamers with new Steam accounts and helped the company bypass traditional retail publishers of the day by directly marketing and selling its games (and, eventually, games from other developers). But 2004-era Steam also faced a vociferous backlash from players who saw the software as a piece of nuisance DRM (digital rights management) that did little to justify its existence at the time. In honor of the anniversary, Orbifold Studios released a new Half-Life 2 RTX trailer. "[T]his is a remastering project that leverages the technologies of NVIDIA's RTX Remix and has the blessing of the original developer, Valve," reports Wccftech. "Orbifold Studios, a team of experienced modders, was founded specifically to bring this project to fruition." It's unclear when exactly this project will be finished.

Nvidia is also giving away a custom Half-Life 2 themed RTX 480 Super Founders Edition.

An academic journal has retracted two papers because it determined their authors used unlicensed software. The Register: Elsevier's Ain Shams Engineering Journal withdrew two papers exploring dam failures after complaints from Flow Science, the Santa Fe, New Mexico-based maker of a computational fluid dynamics application called FLOW-3D.

"Following an editorial investigation as a result of a complaint from the software distributor, the authors admitted that the use of professional software, FLOW-3D program for the results published in the article, was made without a license from the developer," a note from the journal's editor-in-chief explains.

"One of the conditions of submission of a paper for publication is that the article does not violate any intellectual property rights of any person or entity and that the use of any software is made under a license or permission from the software owner."

The Federal Trade Commission is preparing to launch an investigation into anti-competitive practices at Microsoft's cloud computing business, Financial Times reported Thursday, as the US regulator continues to pursue Big Tech in the final weeks of Joe Biden's presidency. From the report: The FTC is examining allegations that Microsoft is abusing its market power in productivity software by imposing punitive licensing terms to prevent customers from moving their data from its Azure cloud service to competitors' platforms, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter.

Tactics being examined include substantially increasing subscription fees for those that leave, charging steep exit fees and allegedly making its Office 365 products incompatible with rival clouds, they added.

An anonymous reader shares a report: After dragging its feet for years, Microsoft has finally released the first official Windows 11 ISOs for PCs with an Arm64 processor. This means users can now clean install Windows 11 using official offline media on an Arm64-based PC, including the latest Snapdragon X Copilot+ PCs.

The ISOs contain version 24H2 can be downloaded from the official Microsoft website, and are around 5GB in size depending on the language you select. According to the company, the ISOs are primarily designed for running Windows 11 in a virtual machine on Arm64 PCs. However, it also mentions that you can use them to clean install Windows 11 directly onto Arm64 hardware too.Unfortunately, depending on the Arm64 PC you have, you may need to do some additional work to get the ISO bootable.

AMD has announced plans to cut 4% of its global workforce as it repositions to compete in the AI chip market dominated by Nvidia. The layoffs will affect approximately 1,040 employees of its 26,000-strong workforce reported at the end of 2023. CNBC adds: AMD produces powerful AI accelerators for data centers, including the MI300X, which companies such as Meta and Microsoft purchase as an alternative to Nvidia-based systems. But Nvidia dominates the market for powerful AI chips, with over 80% market share, partially because it developed the core software that AI engineers use to develop programs such as OpenAI's ChatGPT.

Apple released Final Cut Pro 11 this week, marking the first major version change in over a decade for its professional video editing software. The update introduces several AI-powered features, including a new "Magnetic Mask" function that automatically tracks objects through video clips for targeted color grading and effects.

The suite now offers on-device automatic caption generation for dialogue tracks and adds support for spatial video editing compatible with Apple Vision Pro. Users can adjust the depth of titles and objects for 3D viewing. The update requires macOS 14.6 and at least 8GB of RAM, with some features exclusive to Apple silicon Macs.

Existing Final Cut Pro X users will receive the upgrade at no cost, while new users can purchase the software for $299. Accompanying updates include Final Cut Camera for iPhone, which now supports H.265 HEVC format for Apple Log footage on iPhone 15/16 Pro models, and Final Cut Pro for iPad 2.1, featuring enhanced automated color grading tools and new creative assets.

Projects created on Mac remain incompatible with the iPad version, PetaPixel reports.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: There's a general consensus that we won't be able to consistently perform sophisticated quantum calculations without the development of error-corrected quantum computing, which is unlikely to arrive until the end of the decade. It's still an open question, however, whether we could perform limited but useful calculations at an earlier point. IBM is one of the companies that's betting the answer is yes, and on Wednesday, it announced a series of developments aimed at making that possible. On their own, none of the changes being announced are revolutionary. But collectively, changes across the hardware and software stacks have produced much more efficient and less error-prone operations. The net result is a system that supports the most complicated calculations yet on IBM's hardware, leaving the company optimistic that its users will find some calculations where quantum hardware provides an advantage. [...]

Wednesday's announcement was based on the introduction of the second version of its Heron processor, which has 133 qubits. That's still beyond the capability of simulations on classical computers, should it be able to operate with sufficiently low errors. IBM VP Jay Gambetta told Ars that Revision 2 of Heron focused on getting rid of what are called TLS (two-level system) errors. "If you see this sort of defect, which can be a dipole or just some electronic structure that is caught on the surface, that is what we believe is limiting the coherence of our devices," Gambetta said. This happens because the defects can resonate at a frequency that interacts with a nearby qubit, causing the qubit to drop out of the quantum state needed to participate in calculations (called a loss of coherence). By making small adjustments to the frequency that the qubits are operating at, it's possible to avoid these problems. This can be done when the Heron chip is being calibrated before it's opened for general use.

Separately, the company has done a rewrite of the software that controls the system during operations. "After learning from the community, seeing how to run larger circuits, [we were able to] almost better define what it should be and rewrite the whole stack towards that," Gambetta said. The result is a dramatic speed-up. "Something that took 122 hours now is down to a couple of hours," he told Ars. Since people are paying for time on this hardware, that's good for customers now. However, it could also pay off in the longer run, as some errors can occur randomly, so less time spent on a calculation can mean fewer errors. Despite all those improvements, errors are still likely during any significant calculations. While it continues to work toward developing error-corrected qubits, IBM is focusing on what it calls error mitigation, which it first detailed last year. [...] The problem here is that using the function is computationally difficult, and the difficulty increases with the qubit count. So, while it's still easier to do error mitigation calculations than simulate the quantum computer's behavior on the same hardware, there's still the risk of it becoming computationally intractable. But IBM has also taken the time to optimize that, too. "They've got algorithmic improvements, and the method that uses tensor methods [now] uses the GPU," Gambetta told Ars. "So I think it's a combination of both."

Paul Kinlan, who leads the Chrome and the Open Web Developer Relations team at Google, asks and answers the question (with a no.): Frameworks are abstractions over a platform designed for people and teams to accelerate their teams new work and maintenance while improving the consistency and quality of the projects. They also frequently force a certain type of structure and architecture to your code base. This isn't a bad thing, team productivity is an important aspect of any software.

I'm of the belief that software development is entering a radical shift that is currently driven by agents like Replit's and there is a world where a person never actually has to manipulate code directly anymore. As I was making broad and sweeping changes to the functionality of the applications by throwing the Agent a couple of prompts here and there, the software didn't seem to care that there was repetition in the code across multiple views, it didn't care about shared logic, extensibility or inheritability of components... it just implemented what it needed to do and it did it as vanilla as it could.

I was just left wondering if there will be a need for frameworks in the future? Do the architecture patterns we've learnt over the years matter? Will new patterns for software architecture appear that favour LLM management?

OpenAI's latest large language model, known internally as Orion, has fallen short of performance targets, marking a broader slowdown in AI advancement across the industry's leading companies, according to Bloomberg, corroborating similar media stories in recent days. The model, which completed initial training in September, showed particular weakness in novel coding tasks and failed to demonstrate the same magnitude of improvement over its predecessor as GPT-4 achieved over GPT-3.5, the publication reported Wednesday.

Google's upcoming Gemini software and Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Opus are facing similar challenges. Google's project is not meeting internal benchmarks, while Anthropic has delayed its model's release, Bloomberg said. Industry insiders cited by the publication pointed to growing scarcity of high-quality training data and mounting operational costs as key obstacles. OpenAI's Orion specifically struggled due to insufficient coding data for training, the report said. OpenAI has moved Orion into post-training refinement but is unlikely to release the system before early 2024. The report adds: [...] AI companies continue to pursue a more-is-better playbook. In their quest to build products that approach the level of human intelligence, tech firms are increasing the amount of computing power, data and time they use to train new models -- and driving up costs in the process. Amodei has said companies will spend $100 million to train a bleeding-edge model this year and that amount will hit $100 billion in the coming years.

As costs rise, so do the stakes and expectations for each new model under development. Noah Giansiracusa, an associate professor of mathematics at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts, said AI models will keep improving, but the rate at which that will happen is questionable. "We got very excited for a brief period of very fast progress," he said. "That just wasn't sustainable." Further reading: OpenAI and Others Seek New Path To Smarter AI as Current Methods Hit Limitations.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Royal assent was granted to two right to repair bills last week that amend Canada's Copyright Act to allow the circumvention of technological protection measures (TPMs) if this is done for the purposes of "maintaining or repairing a product, including any related diagnosing," and "to make the program or a device in which it is embedded interoperable with any other computer program, device or component." The pair of bills allow device owners to not only repair their own stuff regardless of how a program is written to prevent such non-OEM measures, but said owners can also make their devices work with third-party components without needing to go through the manufacturer to do so.

Bills C-244 (repairability) and C-294 (interoperability) go a long way toward advancing the right to repair in Canada and, as iFixit pointed out, are the first federal laws anywhere that address how TPMs restrict the right to repair -- but they're hardly final. TPMs can take a number of forms, from simple administrative passwords to encryption, registration keys, or even the need for a physical object like a USB dongle to unlock access to copyrighted components of a device's software. Most commercially manufactured devices with proprietary embedded software include some form of TPM, and neither C-244 nor C-294 place any restrictions on the use of such measures by manufacturers. As iFixit points out, neither Copyright Act amendments do anything to expand access to the tools needed to circumvent TPMs. That puts Canadians in a similar position to US repair advocates, who in 2021 saw the US Copyright Office loosen DMCA restrictions to allow limited repairs of some devices despite TPMs, but without allowing access to the tools needed to do so. [...]

Canadian Repair Coalition co-founder Anthony Rosborough said last week that the new repairability and interoperability rules represent considerable progress, but like similar changes in the US, don't actually amount to much without the right to distribute tools. "New regulations are needed that require manufacturers and vendors to ensure that products and devices are designed with accessibility of repairs in mind," Rosborough wrote in an op-ed last week. "Businesses need to be able to carry out their work without the fear of infringing various intellectual property rights."

If you have Spotify's soon-to-be-bricked Car Thing, there are a few ways you can give it a new lease on life. YouTuber Dammit Jeff has showcased modifications to Car Thing that makes the device useful as a desktop music controller, customizable shortcut tool, or a simple digital clock. Ars Technica's Kevin Purdy reports: Spotify had previously posted the code for its uboot and kernel to GitHub, under the very unassuming name "spsgsb" and with no announcement (as discovered by Josh Hendrickson). Jeff has one idea why the streaming giant might not have made much noise about it: "The truth is, this thing isn't really great at running anything." It has half a gigabyte of memory, 4GB of internal storage, and a "really crappy processor" (Amlogic S905D2 SoC) and is mostly good for controlling music.

How do you get in? The SoC has a built-in USB "burning mode," allowing for a connected computer, running the right toolkit, to open up root access and overwrite its firmware. Jeff has quite a few issues getting connected (check his video description for some guidance), but it's "drag and drop" once you're in. Jeff runs through a few of the most popular options for a repurposed Car Thing:

- DeskThing, which largely makes Spotify desk-friendly, but adds a tiny app store for weather (including Jeff's own WeatherWave), clocks, and alternate music controls
- GlanceThing, which keeps the music controls but also provides some Stream-Deck-like app-launching shortcuts for your main computer.
- Nocturne, currently invite-only, is a wholly redesigned Spotify interface that restores all its Spotify functionality.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: VMware has announced that its VMware Fusion and VMware Workstation desktop hypervisors are now free to everyone for commercial, educational, and personal use. In May, the company also made VMware Workstation Pro and Fusion Pro free for personal use, allowing students and home users to set up virtualized test labs and experiment with other OSs by running virtual machines and Kubernetes clusters on Windows, Linux, and macOS devices. Starting this week, the Pro versions and the two products will no longer be available under a paid subscription model.

"Effective immediately, both VMware Fusion and VMware Workstation will transition away from the paid subscription model, meaning you can now utilize these tools without any cost. The paid versions of these offerings -- Workstation Pro and Fusion Pro -- are no longer available for purchase," said Broadcom product marketing director Himanshu Singh. "If you're currently under a commercial contract, you can rest easy knowing that your agreement will remain in effect until the end of your term. You will continue to receive the full level of service and enterprise-grade support as per your contract."

While the free versions will include all the features available in the paid products, Broadcom will no longer provide users with support ticketing for troubleshooting. Broadcom plans to continue developing new features and improvements and ensure that updates are rolled out promptly. "We're actively investing in new features, usability improvements, and other valuable enhancements," Singh added. "Our engineering teams are committed to maintaining our high standards for stability, with timely updates and reliable performance." You can download VMware Fusion and VMware Workstation here (sign-in required).

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Flock is one of the largest vendors of automated license plate readers (ALPRs) in the country. The company markets itself as having the goal to fully "eliminate crime" with the use of ALPRs and other connected surveillance cameras, a target experts say is impossible. [...] Flock and automated license plate reader cameras owned by other companies are now in thousands of neighborhoods around the country. Many of these systems talk to each other and plug into other surveillance systems, making it possible to track people all over the country.

"It went from me seeing 10 license plate readers to probably seeing 50 or 60 in a few days of driving around," [said Alabama resident and developer Will Freeman]. "I wanted to make a record of these things. I thought, 'Can I make a database of these license plate readers?'" And so he made a map, and called it DeFlock. DeFlock runs on Open Street Map, an open source, editable mapping software. He began posting signs for DeFlock (PDF) to the posts holding up Huntsville's ALPR cameras, and made a post about the project to the Huntsville subreddit, which got good attention from people who lived there. People have been plotting not just Flock ALPRs, but all sorts of ALPRs, all over the world. [...]

When I first talked to Freeman, DeFlock had a few dozen cameras mapped in Huntsville and a handful mapped in Southern California and in the Seattle suburbs. A week later, as I write this, DeFlock has crowdsourced the locations of thousands of cameras in dozens of cities across the United States and the world. He said so far more than 1,700 cameras have been reported in the United States and more than 5,600 have been reported around the world. He has also begun scraping parts of Flock's website to give people a better idea of where to look to map them. For example, Flock says that Colton, California, a city with just over 50,000 people outside of San Bernardino, has 677 cameras.

People who submit cameras to DeFlock have the ability to note the direction that they are pointing in, which can help people understand how these cameras are being positioned and the strategies that companies and police departments are using when deploying them. For example, all of the cameras in downtown Huntsville are pointing away from the downtown core, meaning they are primarily focused on detecting cars that are entering downtown Huntsville from other areas.

Red Hat, the IBM-owned open source software firm, is acquiring Neural Magic, a startup that optimizes AI models to run faster on commodity processors and GPUs. From a report: The terms of the deal weren't disclosed. MIT research scientist Alex Matveev and professor Nir Shavit founded Somerville, Massachusetts-based Neural Magic in 2018, inspired by their work in high-performance execution engines for AI. Neural Magic's software aims to process AI workloads on processors and GPUs at speeds equivalent to specialized AI chips (e.g. TPUs). By running models on off-the-shelf processors, which usually have more available memory, the company's software can realize these performance gains.

Big tech companies like AMD and a host of other startups, including NeuReality, Deci, CoCoPie, OctoML and DeepCube, offer some sort of AI optimization software. But Neural Magic is one of the few with a free platform and a collection of open source tools to complement it. Neural Magic had so far managed to raise $50 million in venture capital from backers like Andreessen Horowitz, New Enterprise Associations, Amdocs, Comcast Ventures, Pillar VC and Ridgeline Ventures.

Microsoft is planning to no longer support the Windows Mail, Calendar, and People apps later this year. The Verge: The software giant has been moving existing users of these apps over to the new Outlook for Windows app in recent months, and now it has set an end of support date for the Mail, Calendar, and People apps of December 31st.

Once the apps reach end of support later this year, Microsoft warns that users who haven't moved to the new Outlook app "will no longer be able to send and receive email using Windows Mail and Calendar."

Microsoft has been rolling out the new Outlook for Windows app for years, with it officially reaching the general availability stage in August. The new web-based Outlook is designed to eventually replace the full desktop version of Outlook too, and Microsoft plans to provide enterprise customers a 12-month notice before it starts to move people away from the desktop version of Outlook.